I spent a significant part of last summer preparing myself to get knocked on my ass, because I knew that I was not going to become a cyclist overnight. When the reality of what I really wanted sunk in, and I accepted the fact that I secretly craved hardship, I suppose I started trying to seek it out. I always knew that in the end, my efforts would not be wasted; I didn’t have to go very far to find it.

As a teenager on the quest for enlightenment it has always been easy to elaborate on the dark side of life. It has always been easy to get lost in carefully chosen words, or lost in the pages of a seldom used moleskin journal. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I guess in many ways I still don’t. I hadn’t been cycling for long and I hadn’t been writing for much longer. All I knew was that I wanted something from a particular piece of time, something that I did not intend to return. And I thought the only way I could capture that was through writing.

Getting lost in the daily motion of constant pedaling was just another way for me to stay in the moment, something that I not only highly valued but also found to be really tricky. The loneliness that I had been striving for kicked in as soon as I realized that I was doing something that most people didn’t even want to do. I was doing something that was going to be a lot harder than I expected, and I was going to be doing it by myself. So began the most difficult part of my bike trip- the summer leading up to it.

I thoroughly hated every minute of my daily bike rides at first, mostly because they were so repetitive. There is something surreal about moving through space at a steady 14 miles an hour, but for some reason I spent most of my summer taking full advantage of the ability it gave me to zone out. I used this same trick a lot when I was on the Southern Tier; when I wasn’t looking out at the emptiness before me, or squinting my eyes to catch a glimpse of the Atlantic coast, I was staring down at my front wheel and day dreaming.

What I was dreaming about last summer was making my escape. How was riding my bike across the country going to be beneficial to me? Mostly I just didn’t want to go to college; it wasn’t even Autumn yet and I was already terrified of getting caught in the cycle of post-highschool normality.

I have felt this self created pressure to swim upstream more and more as I have gotten older. As long as I have been encouraged to blaze my own trail, I have assumed that I have been doing the right thing by purposely being an outlier. I don’t know where my generation got this ability to follow our dreams without having to acknowledge their inevitable repercussions, but we’re lucky we do. The only thing that makes me different from everybody else is only the degree to which I enjoy the eventual downfall of my elaborate plans, because it is dramatic and, in it’s own way, weirdly exciting. I have chosen not to avoid intensity, partly because I like to learn the hard way and partly because it gives me something to write about.

The first week of my trip was intense as hell. The prospect of a 4,000 foot climb in elevation coupled with the fact that it was almost always over 100 degrees seemed daunting enough. What made it shittier yet was the fact that I got food poisoning in the middle of nowhere with three guys that were, at the time, mere acquaintances. By day five my cheap bike was already starting to fall apart under all the weight of my gear, I had changed upwards of a dozen flat tires, I had gotten poison ivy all over my body and I was holding the rest of my group back. Just before we got into Phoenix we were sidetracked by flash flooding and when we finally did get into town, I was left in a McDonald’s parking lot while the rest of my group went on without me.

Looking back it was one of the unluckiest and most uncomfortable weeks of my life, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t love every minute of it. It was so humid that our bodies were constantly dripping with sweat, our eyes constantly stinging from the salt. We used umbrellas as shade at some point; I hid from the sun under a conservative campaign sign that I had felt no guilt in plucking from the parched ground. It was crazy; the desert swallowed the road, and the never-ending road swallowed our motivation. The fire ants taunted us when we thought about sitting on the ground, and when we were thirsty all we had to drink was the hot water we were hauling in our panniers. The smell of the baking earth swarmed in on us and took our minds on some tired, hallucinogenic trip. We were lost, but we were together. At least until I got abandoned.

I had essentially failed because I hadn’t given up on myself, and therefore my cycling companions had to give up on me. I can’t say that I enjoyed being tired, hot, or hungry, but for whatever reason I felt prepared for it in those days. Because it wasn’t about overcoming all of the physical limitations that came my way, it was about learning how to navigate through the emotional complications that I expected. For that one week of my trip I was blessed with blissful naivety, and I didn’t realize what I was truly up against. When I was left in Phoenix I felt like I must have been fooling myself, because I had no idea that I was slowing the group down so much. I stayed in the city for ten days before I found a new group to ride with, all of which I spent laying in bed feeling sorry for myself. My bike was falling apart, and I knew that I could fix it, but my determination was falling apart too, and hiding under the covers in an air-conditioned hotel room was not putting it back together.